Hall of Shame

Standing in line at a Starbucks in Albany the other day, Bruce Roter scanned a headline on a BlackBerry about a new ethics probe in the New York State Assembly. “Micah Kellner,” he said, with a hint of bemusement. “It just doesn’t stop.” Kellner, a Democratic assemblyman now running for City Council in Manhattan, was accused of sexual harassment in 2009 (“I wouldn’t mind falling asleep with you but not remotely,” Kellner instant-messaged a young female staffer, after midnight), and the Assembly’s subsequent failure to pursue the case has led to an investigation of a potential coverup—a seeming pattern of protecting legislators from embarrassment. You could argue that this scenario is itself an embarrassment, no less damaging to the state’s reputation than Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer. But Bruce Roter is an opportunist. “What does the rest of the world know us for?” he said. “It knows Albany and corruption. And I’m thinking to myself, What a great resource!”

Roter is a classical composer (“A Camp David Overture,” for example) and an associate professor of music at the College of Saint Rose, in Albany, but he is better known around town as “that Trader Joe’s guy,” the organizer of a five-year letter-writing campaign to persuade the grocery-store chain to expand into the Capital District. He was dressed in a dark suit with a “Never Forget” pin on his lapel, in order to project an air of authority for his new civic proposal, which sounds, at first blush, like a joke. “The Albany Museum of Political Corruption,” he said. “I believe it should be taken seriously as far as state and federal grants are concerned. This tells an important history of New York State.”

Names rush through the mind as it compiles a Hall of Shame: Boss Tweed, Stanley Friedman, Pedro Espada, Jr. “Who knows, maybe we could have some of our former legislators act as, shall we say, guest docents,” Roter said, and mimicked a surprised tourist: “ ‘Hey, it’s Al D’Amato!’ ” It had been three weeks since he was first struck with the idea—“Right here!” he said, referring to Starbucks—and he had created a Web site and a Facebook page to honor the cause. The Times-Union, the city’s paper of record, was on board. (“A Museum of Political Corruption would bring international attention, revealing Albany as a city with a sense of humor,” the columnist Chris Churchill wrote.) “At our gift shop, I want to sell these little figurines of men and women in suits, and written on them it says, ‘I bought this legislator in Albany, New York,’ ” Roter said.

“I’ve heard from some who say, ‘You better get yourself a good defamation lawyer,’ ” Roter went on, and explained that he’d come up with a convenient hedge. How about expanding the project’s scope and calling it the Albany Museum of Political Scandal, Corruption, and Misconduct—or SCAM, for short? “New York City has its MOMA,” he said. “We’d have our SCAM. And then I think we can franchise.” The Washington, D.C., SCAM could feature dramatic readings of e-mail correspondence between Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed.

The SCAM concept, Roter suggested, would make it easier to honor Joseph Bruno, the former State Senate Majority Leader, who beat wire-fraud charges on appeal, in 2011, only to learn, earlier this month, that he may be tried again: a source of scandal, at the least. “We might be able to serve Bruno Burgers in our café, which could be listed as one-third of a pound of Angus beef,” he said. The joke, he added, would come from the fact that the burgers would be “neither a third of a pound nor Angus.”

Trader Joe’s opened a store three miles south of the Albany airport last year. “They’ll publicly deny that our campaign had anything to do with it,” Roter said, beginning to sound like a politician on the stump. “It was the gratitude that I received from the community that really gave me the taste for what public service should be about.” He copped to having received, for his efforts, a basket of free food at the grand opening—a bit of “honest graft,” as George Washington Plunkitt would have called it.

Stepping out onto State Street, Roter walked first up the hill, toward the Capitol, and then back down, stopping before a building with a for-sale sign. “What do you think?” he said. “Is it big enough?” The sign advertised forty thousand square feet—room enough for a Tammany Hall exhibit and a Men Behaving Badly wing (Hiram Monserrate, Vito Lopez), though maybe not enough space to parse the disruptive role of the entrenched, if law-abiding, Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver. “Let them walk down the hill,” Roter said of the actual legislators, with their offices up above, in the Capitol. “Let them morally descend.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.